Debian's multiarchitecture support, vendor independence, social
contract and huge software base make it an attractive choice for all
sorts of systems, but the main distribution is very much aimed at systems
with at least desktop resources (big hard discs, plenty of memory).
Embedded Debian has tried to strip Debian down to be a much smaller system
whilst keeping all the good things.

Status of Emdebian distributions

As of July 2014, updates to the Emdebian distributions ceased. There
will be no further updates and no further stable releases.

What changed?

The availability of devices without expandable storage became too
small to sustain the amount of work required to prepare the distribution.
Any device capable of using an SD card has more than enough storage to
run a standard Debian distribution.

What about low resource machines?

Emdebian is based on Debian and therefore uses Debian packages. Some
Emdebian installations did make lower demands on the machine hardware
but this was be because the Emdebian installation selected packages
already in Debian that were intended for such purposes. Those packages
have mostly been removed due to lack of activity upstream and a lack of
suitable devices.

An old PC with a reasonably large hard drive (or a capacity to use a
modern multi-gigabyte hard drive or other media) was not likely to
benefit from Emdebian.

Complete repositories of packages for various architectures, based on
coreutils and perl. Support for standard Debian tools like debian-installer.
No functional changes compared to Debian. Support is available for i386,
amd64, powerpc, armel, armhf, mips and mipsel. Unofficial Debian ports for powerpcspe and sh4 are available for unstable.

Emdebian Grip 1.0 (based on Debian 5.0 "Lenny") is already in widespread
usage as well as Emdebian Grip 2.0 (based on Debian 6.0 "Squeeze").
Binary compatibility means that each suite of Emdebian Grip is as close to the
stability of the equivalent Debian suite as possible.

Emdebian Grip can support building packages and can be installed as
a simple migration from Debian in the normal ways, although as Debian
continues to update beyond Wheezy, this is likely to become harder. A
recommended way to install Emdebian Grip 1.0 is to use the Debian Lenny
or Squeeze installer to install a Debian base system and use pre-seeding to migrate to Grip during the
installation process. Subsequent versions also work with the
Debian Installer or with multistrap.

Only available for ARM, based on Debian 5.0 Lenny.

Busybox based root filesystem and packages to support the G Palmtop
Environment based on GTK+2 or any workable package selection in-between.
Kernels and kernel modules are not provided directly but support exists
to add custom kernels to the installation tarballs.

Emdebian Crush does not support building packages on Crush itself,
all work to develop packages for Crush must be done on a normal Debian
machine. There is no migration path from Debian to Emdebian Crush.

Installations of Emdebian Crush require significant user involvement,
images will not generally be available for direct download. Instead,
each installation is customised from the available package set using the
multistrap package.

All development on Crush has ceased, there will be no further
releases or updates of Crush.

Preconfigured root filesystems for devices which do not need to
be upgraded.

Embedded Debian is currently very much a work-in-progress: plenty of
people are already using Debian in their devices and systems, but there
is huge potential to make doing this easier. We already have tools,
toolchains and a root filesystem, but more work is needed to have full
distributions ready to build or download. Anyone with an interest in
this area is very welcome to help.